One motivation for US conservatives’ opposition to abortion – “a woman’s right to choose” – as stated by demographer Ben Wattenberg (after the 1970s in his increasingly neoconservative later years), and cited by Jane Elliott (the wonderful educator) in her anti-racism teachings, is that white supremacists’ great fear is over demographic dilution.

American conservatives’ opposition to abortion is not primarily concerned with preventing Blacks, minorities and the poor from procreating too many (and “too costly” to the public purse) non-white babies, but in fact to prevent white women from producing too few white babies.

This was exactly the policy of the Nazi regime in Germany, when bounties were paid for high fertility by acceptably white – “Aryan” – women. The fertility rate of Whites (in Europe, in the U.S.A., in South Africa, in Israel with its captive and concentration-encamped Palestine) is the lowest of all ethnicities/races. Generally speaking, the poorer and darker people are, and the closer to the equator they live or come from, the more children they are likely to have produced and/or have in their families. There is a worldwide darkening of the complexion of humanity underway.

Were there not immigration into the wealthy and comfortable Northern European nations, which we used to think of as “pure white,” they would be losing population in coming decades (if not already). There is a direct INVERSE correlation between an ethnic/racial segment of a national population having greater educational attainment and financial security, and a higher standard of living (a higher level of their nation’s Human Development Index, as tallied by the U.N.), and their fertility rate. The education and emancipation of poor Third World women – teaching them to read, and giving them means of gaining independent income – is the best way to reduce runaway fertility and stabilize “overpopulation.” That is why Whites have the lowest fertility rate as compared with darker and poorer people.

So, Northern Europe, the U.S.A. and other wealthy White enclaves are seeing their share of the population drop (proportionally in their nations). This is due to higher competing fertility more so than by “invasive immigration” by non-whites and foreigners of different type from that of the nativists.

In one sense the Nazi policy was kinder than that of tight-fisted US conservatives today, in that the Nazis provided good maternal medical care nationally to their favored “Aryan” portion of the German population (from 1933 till the war destroyed domestic life in Germany).

Jane Elliott’s basic point is that US white supremacist panic about demographic dilution is what lies behind American political anti-abortion. The pseudo-moralistic religiosity camouflage layered over this “pro-life movement” is just to hide its racist foundation. This religious put-on is easily revealed as a fraud by the complete lack of concern by “moral majority” and “tea party” type nativist-racists about any real threats to women and girls by good-old-boy Roy Moore type child molesters, and other sexual harassers of women, like Donald Trump and many other men in power, especially if white and “conservative.”

Do you imagine the Republicans and their base (indeed) supporters would now be yawning, instead of incensed, over the Stormy Daniels ’Castoff Porn Star Lover Of The President’ affair if it was Barack Obama (or even serial masher Horny Billy the C) she was calling out instead of Trump?

1 is active on formerly “near distant” foreign land now reincorporated into Russia (Crimea);

3 are active in distant foreign lands (2 in Syria, 1 in Vietnam);

1 is inactive in a distant foreign land (Cuba);

the last five types total to 15.

Notice that the 3 active distant foreign bases are:

– the large naval facility on the Syrian (Mediterranean) coast, at Tartus, and the nearby Khmeimim air base;

– the signals intelligence ‘spy’ post near the Golan Heights (for monitoring communications by Syrian rebel groups and the Israeli Defense Forces), which was overrun by the Free Syrian Army rebels in October 2014 (at least two other Russian intelligence centers are now assumed to be located inside Syria);

– the large naval and air force base at Cam Ranh Bay, in Vietnam.

Clearly, Russia’s only distant (not in former USSR territory) foreign military base near the Atlantic Ocean is its naval and air force facilities on the coast of Syria. Its only other distant foreign military base is on the coast of Vietnam, and thus by the South China Sea (and Pacific Ocean).

The United States has about 800 foreign military bases in about 70 countries; and many encircling Russian in the countries now liberated from the former U.S.S.R.

So, it is easy to see that a major priority (perhaps the top priority) of Russian foreign policy would be to ensure the maintenance and security of its three distant foreign military bases, in particular its two large naval and air force bases, in Syria and Vietnam; and most particularly its coastal Syrian base complex. The Russian naval base in Syria is at a focal point between the Levant, Southern Europe and North Africa.

While Russia has a major military presence in Southeast Asia, with its base at Cam Ranh Bay, it also has a second point from which to project military power into the Pacific region (and globally by submarines): its military facilities in Vladivostok (Eastern Siberia, by the Northwest Pacific, Russia’s eastern flank). But its sole ‘distant’ foreign base on its western flank is its base (naval base and associated air force base) in Syria.

Given the above (my estimation of Russian foreign policy and military priorities) what can we deduce about Russian government preferences regarding possible American (US) regimes? In 2016 the US election was narrowed to three potential candidates: Donald Trump (for the Republicans), and either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders (for the Democrats).

From the Russian perspective, Hillary Clinton as US president was most likely to start covert and overt military actions against Russian interests, a.k.a. war with Syria. That same Russian estimation of potential American foreign policies under either a President Donald Trump or President Bernie Sanders would rate the likelihood of anti-Russian (and anti-Syrian) warlike activity by the U.S. as significantly lower. So, naturally they would prefer Trump or Bernie as the US president after 2016.

Since it was obvious that the Democratic machine and entrenched bipartisan neoliberal capitalist cabal would thwart the Sanders campaign and strongly favor Hillary Clinton, Russian political analysts saw Trump as their American candidate of choice. Thus Russian propaganda and agit-prop aimed at the U.S.A. during 2016 was designed to damage the public image of Hillary Clinton (not hard to do), boost the public image of Donald Trump (not easy to do, but a fascinating challenge to clever and patriotic Russian political gamers), and to launch anti-Hillary barbs couched as rabidly pro-Sanders social media messages, which were disguised to appear as authentic expressions by Sanders’ supporters.

Trump’s vanity bristles at the idea that Russian CIA-like covert election tampering could have had any positive effect in gaining him the presidency (by disaffecting potential Hillary voters), so he angrily dismisses the idea of “Russian interference.”

Hillary’s vanity is publicly outraged by the idea that her coronation as the “first female US president” could have been derailed by “Russian interference,“ and she is no doubt ‘privately’ grateful to the Russians for providing her with another excuse to cover for her cupidity, corruption and incompetence, which put off many possible Hillary voters, and which reality was the second most important cause of her Electoral College failing grade and Trump’s success there. The most important cause of Trump’s Electoral College success, of course, was his genuine appeal to white supremacy, anti-female sexism, crony capitalism and latent fascism. These last four factors also have some appeal with the Putin Regime in Russia.

We leave it to Robert Mueller (Special Counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections) to ascertain the facts, but it seems fairly clear why Donald Trump and the Republican Party dislike and try to hobble the Mueller probe, and why the machine Democrats have been so strident in wanting it to continue and expand into a coup d’état by administrative procedures.

A second and more likely to be successful alternative for the Democrats to replace Trump (and many of his enabling Republicans) is by winning elections; but that would require allowing Bernie Sanders to lead the party and set its agenda. So, that’s forbidden: party over country.

Donald Trump is a bigot, liar, thief, coward and crybaby. The first three are standard for USA Republicans today (the political descendants of Ronald Reagan, the neocons of the Bush II Administration, the populist white supremacy idiots of the “Tea Party,” and also Trump’s fan-base of fearful failures hiding behind their threat displays as Neo-Nazis and closeted Ku Klux Klan wizards).

On his own, Trump is pathetic. The only reason he seems capable of advancing his menacing intent is because he manages to get many willing enablers from the technical, legal, financial and political professions, who see him as a convenient avenue, or public distraction, allowing them to advance their personal ambitions for swindling the public.

Few in this pack of jackals have any respect for Trump, they see him as an idiot, but a useful one. For them, he is at best a child who has stumbled into power, and they must thread a knife-edge path between pushing back against Trump’s chaotic tantrums, and meekly serving his whims with humiliating obsequiousness, in order to preserve the viability of their own intrigues.

Trump is a coward because he needs his pack of jackals to compensate for his fear and incompetence – he cannot do anything for himself, nor face challenges alone – and he is a crybaby because he needs his jackal nannies to maintain his infantilism as a geriatric spoiled child who wants endless indiscriminate loving approval.

While Trump, and his enablers, are certainly useless for the public good, the deeper societal tragedy is that so many Americans, high and low, are so eager to jump into the whirlpool of corruption whose public persona – at the moment – is Donald Trump. It is the willing ignorance and failures of moral character that so many Americans disrespect themselves by carrying on, which provides the hot air to inflate the pestilent bubble of the Trump Administration. Trump is not an anomaly, he is representative of a large and chronic abscess in the American national character.

The most important step to cleaning out that abscess and deflating the power of this pathetic persecutor is to stop thinking of yourself as a helpless victim, and/or to stop acting as a knuckle-headed bigot and simpleton enabler, by having the grit to expand your mind with critical thinking and to develop a robust moral character. Such self-development will lead you to possess the inestimable treasure of a true and enduring self-respect. It is the solidarity between people such as these that can expand into a real social revolution, and the eventual sloughing off of parasites like those crawling around in Trump’s swamp.

Donald Trump is America’s child. He was nurtured insulated from the world’s potential reactions to naïve ignorance, and stupid and irresponsible behavior. In this, Trump is the icon of the kind of child so many American parents have striven and sacrificed to raise: an envelope of their combined genes isolated in a protective bubble from the realities and wide spectrum of ideas at loose in the world. Wealth is ignorance-, stupidity-, and irresponsibility insurance; the everlasting cocoon of American dreams.

Many millions will pity Trump for the cascade of ridicule falling upon him now, and love him the more for this suffering because in him they see themselves: with the same afflictions but without the same protections. They are all overaged children lost in a hostile sneering world, a world they do not understand and hatefully resent because it withholds its unquestioning approval and effusive indiscriminate love.

The United States of America is dead. We are merely Occupied Territories, economically raped by robotic corporate behemoths of obsessive and inhuman greed, which dump their wastes, their debts and their ruin on the masses of human victims left to die unnoticed in the wreckage of what once was a nation.

“America First!” indeed. Truly, it is “Destroy America First!”, “Disgrace America First!,” “Abandon America First!”, plow it under a tsunami of traitorous greed, under an ocean of supremely petty, myopically self-aggrandizing mediocrity, of graceless, loutish stupidity, and of abysmal lack of character.

Bernie Sanders will be remembered by people’s historians as the greatest American of our times – like Winston Churchill was for the British in 1940 – because he has fought so brilliantly, so wholeheartedly, and in such an inspiring way, for the best vision of a United States of America that American people as a whole could ever have: a people united by the social ideal of caring for one another, and through that nation-wide mutual caring to resurrect and rebuild this nation: its network of human interactions, its infrastructure within which those human interactions occur, and new innovative technologies that help free the people from unnecessary grinding work and human physical vulnerabilities and personal insecurities.

What today the braying touts in the corporate media (which includes most of the Congress) call “The United States of America” is a corpse of an idea, it is dead because it no longer includes the “We the People” who aspired “to form a more perfect union.” I am part of that officially invisible nation, the “We the People” insurgency that holds that vision expressed so nobly by Bernie Sanders, of that “more perfect union” eventually triumphing over these dark times, perhaps in my lifetime, or perhaps in that of my children’s or beyond.

One has to remember that today’s mountains, even the Himalayas, rose out of the depths of the oceans of the past. Our vision is that like the rise of our mountains, our “more perfect union” will inch up over time because of the pressure of our belief in it today, and because of the pressure of belief in it by our kindred spirits in succeeding generations.

The most significant political development in the United States occurred between 1854 and 1968 — from Lincoln to LBJ — during which the Republican Party switched from being anti-slavery to pro-slavery, while the Democratic Party switched from being pro-slavery to anti-slavery.

After 1991 — from W. Clinton through Obama to H. Clinton, almost — the Democratic Party steadily regressed back in the direction of its original pro-slavery orientation. This regression is a part of the grand bipartisan War On The Poor, which continues today. The Republicans are the leading force in this war, with the Democrats reactively following.

Today’s efforts at political organization by the anti-slavery movement are vigorously opposed by the bipartisan pro-slavery powers, and their War On The Poor is structured as organized white supremacy-dominated greed claiming to defend the rights of unorganized individual greed — called “freedom” — against the supposed slavery that organized sharing — called socialism — would impose against “individual initiative.”

Many of the naïve victims of the War On The Poor are hampered in defending themselves by their political immaturity, which is a consequence of their ignorance, biases and wishful thinking.

The tragedy of Puerto Rico is that it assumed – incorrectly – that it would be protected and prosperous as an American colony because America is so rich and powerful, and that from there it could eventually become the 51st American state, thus gaining voting representation in the American Congress, which determines how the benefits of American wealth and power are distributed.

What Puerto Rico failed to realize is that both individuals and nations that are rich and powerful did not become that way by being generous and inclusive.

Puerto Rico assumed there were only three modes of existence it might experience:

(1) a protected, prosperous, US state (like Florida)

(protected by US military power, prosperous by being a domestic participant in the US economy, and having a state’s voice in the crafting of national policy and legislation affecting it);

(2) a protected, prosperous, US colony

(a protected and prosperous captive of the United States, being reliant on American benevolence but without any political power to shape the nature and magnitude of that benevolence);

(3) an unprotected, poor, independent nation (like Cuba).

Option 1, statehood, is blocked by the apartheid mentality of the white supremacy anti-Latino bigotry that is the primal glue bonding the majoritarian clan controlling the American republic. The Republicans are not likely to vote for the addition, from a new state of Puerto Rico, of five more Democrats in the House and two in the Senate.

Option 2, a colony, is the status quo for Puerto Rico because that status most suits the colonizer.

Option 3, independence, entails the hazards of self-protection against all threats, whether natural, military or economic.

In this view, US statehood is a distant hope and perhaps only an illusion; but being a US colony is preferable to independence because a US colony is assumed to have much greater security and comfort than a likely poor, independent Caribbean island nation, like Cuba, Jamaica or Haiti.

However, as a result of the bankruptcy of the colonial government of Puerto Rico ($73B in May 2017), and its massive devastation from Hurricane Maria (in September 2017), both of which the Trump Administration has shown a singular hostility and indifference to help with, Puerto Rico has awakened to its actual mode of existence: an unprotected, poor and destroyed colony; essentially a disinherited dependent, a captive castoff.

If Puerto Rico were an independent nation instead of a colony, even with its current dual crisis of bankruptcy and hurricane devastation, it would have the freedom to direct its own efforts for humanitarian, physical and economic recovery, and of seeking international help, which efforts are now restricted by US law (e.g., Jones Act) and control-oriented obstructionism by the Trump Administration.

From the perspective of Puerto Rico’s present situation, being another Cuba can no longer be seen as a worse fate.

The current tragedy of Puerto Rico is accelerating (as transport becomes more available) the already high rate of emigration from the island and its failed economy, to the US mainland (a net emigration of 64,000 in 2014, 84,000 left and 20,000 returned, for a population loss on the island of 1.8%).

Perhaps the current tragedy of Puerto Rico will reinvigorate the independence movement among the island residents who do not wish to use their American citizenship as a free pass for escaping. If so, they would join the ferment for gaining control over their national fate, shared today by Catalonia, Kurdistan, and Palestine.